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We recommend to such clients that they apply the robots noindex,follow meta tag on the duplicated pages until they get rewritten. We aim for 20% of all products on the site to be completely unique in content, and indexable. The other 80% can be rewritten gradually over time and released back into the index as they are rewritten. So to answer you question: Yes, I think your plan is perfectly acceptable, and is what I would do myself if I were in the same situation.

Marie is correct - this is unlikely to work unless you are VERY careful to not let Google know that the websites are connected, as they're partial to transferring penalties from one site to another if you try to get rid of a penalty by starting a new, identical website. Simply redirecting a penalised site is a trick that used to work back in 2009, 2010 (you don't mention redirection, but it's worth noting that this used to work, so if you see it mentioned online it's probably old information). Even if you do not redirect the old site, Google may still recognise that the content is identical to a website it previously penalised, especially if all the new site's registration information, hosting, template, etc. is the same as the old site. That's not for sure - you may get away with doing this if there are no ties between the old, penalised site and the new site, but using identical content is a big give-away. Assuming that your penalty was links-related, the safest way to do this is to remove the old site's content, wait until Google cache the old site with the content gone (so the content is completely out of the index), take the site down and re-publish on the new domain. That said, Google's ability to remember what it has seen before could result in the scenario Marie describes.

Hi, I would just ignore that. No real harm can come out of this. However, if you do have some time on your hands and there is no other better use of it I would look at the logs and see if Google Bot is hiting both version. If that is the case then you need to deal with those as you are wasting crawl budget that can be used in a more productive way (but that's only if you have a big site and crawling can actually improve your performance). Hope it helps.

Another thing: When I click to read the message in webmaster's tools, I get a message saying that I used link spam and I get this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6UFHCw4Q_FQ As an illustration of my situation. Now when I go to the search traffic tab and click on manual action, it tells me that some of my links are suspicious and that they may have been made by someone else than me. Because of that the manual action will be to stop taking those links into account. The video I get as an illustration is that one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Y74Op_k6UY Which is a lot less alarming. Also it says: Impact on the whole site: none Impact on a part of the website: yes. And then they give me reasons for it. So my question is: should I expect to lose rankings because it's the first video that applies to my case, or should I expect some links to not being taken into account anymore because it's the second video that applies to me? Thanks.

I agree with Tom and Lynn.  It would be technically possible if you make sure there is no connection with the site, (who is, theme, content, different host/ ip range, etc), there would be no way for google to know one person is behind it. But the amount of work to do that with white hat methods would be incredibly hard ( even with black hat it would be very hard), for a decent keyword worth ranking for..... I don't think its possible these days.

Hi I just answered a question like this the other day http://moz.com/community/q/naming-a-brand-domain Hope this helps, Thomas

This happened to me, too. Google has been finding these links since last October, and I just keep adding the domains to my Disavow list. My rank has slipped a bit (from 2 to 4) but its hard to know if these thinks are the reason. Probably not. When the links were first pointed at my site, Google moved me from 2nd to 1st place for my top keywords. The bad links seemed to give me about a one week a temporary boost, before we settled back to 2nd . Google HAS to be aware of this. Their silence on this issue is deafening. Cutts gave it a little bit of lip service; but there must be tens of millions of these junk links being added daily judging from all of the people selling 100k bad links on Fiverr for five bucks. So far I'm mostly annoyed by these bad links, rather than hurt by them.This has really screwed up all the intense work I did to scrutinize and analyze my link profile. A nice feature for SEOmoz would be to allow us to UPLOAD our DISAVOW list so we can get some of our reports with the junk scrubbed out. After all, if I tell Google to ignore these 1,000 links and presuming they actually do ignore them, then it would be more useful to get SEOmoz reports with that data removed as well.

Hello, The cities I've put in my examples are examples. The city I'm going to target is easy to rank for and stable. Thanks for your advice, but I will give my ideas a shot as I'm sure we can pull it off. We did it several times already and am just looking for the biggest opportunities. I agree with you that traffic means money so if you have specific good keyword ideas, that'd be great. Thanks

I don't think the spam email has much to do with your positioning in Google - if they were to ban your page it wouldn't show anywhere. The more common results would be : someone has complained about the duplicate content found on other site site was using some illegal structure such as hidden text etc. There is obviously a connection between the email, website via IP address of the domain (that is if Email is hosted on the same server - MX records point to the same IP), but as already explained - if that was the case, you would most likely to be gone completely from SERP. I hope this answers your question.

Thanks for youe help Keri. It was more of a step by step guide of the things you're supposed to do.